Tribute to the C64

C64 was my first computer (back to 1989.). You never forget your first love, so I'll keep these pages unchanged as reminder to those times. At my Univeristy www.fesb.hr I was challenged by my Digital Electronics professor that I'll never succeed to connect the C64 with 3.5 inch PC floppy diskette drive, so I made interface from bunch of 74xx digital circuits, AT controller card with FDD controller and 3.5 PC diskette drive and device worked as charm! I've even manage to emulate and implement C64 version of Norton Commander, simple C64 File manager using FAT system, so diskette content can be read/write from both PC and C64. Normally, when my colleague had to transfer his seminar work from C64 to the PC, device stopped working, but nevertheless I still have original PCB circuit, AT card FDD controller card and of course C64 the king of all computers. It's amazing how many powerful and useful programs can be fitted into the 64Kb of memory, in now days even ordinary cell phone or PDA requires few Mbytes or even Gbytes to even start!

Everlasting COMMODORE 64, first computer of mine and of many other computer scouts. There are few of us trying to prevent falling C64 to the darknes of ignorance....

How to connect 1.44Mb floppy drive to C64 - find out more info about my masterpiece (this is the hardest way for connecting PC & C64).This piece of hardware (Disk Demon) allows you to easily transfer data between C64 and PC using ordinary 1.44Mb PC-diskette. Detail description of hardware and software used to accomplish that.

PC2C64 - connecting PC and C64 with parallel cable using bidirectional port - this is easiest way for connecting: you need only parallel cable to connect and bidirectional parallel port (with PS/2-EPP ability) on your PC. Characteristic of this project is safe (utilizes handshake lines and so-called CHECK-SUM check) and simple 8-bit (whole hardware is one parallel cable) transfer of data between PC and C64. Additional data about parallel cable get on my electronic page.

Utilities for PC & C64

PC:

Convert tools - once you transfer files (games) from C64 to the PC you may want to convert them into format which can be recognize by every C64 emulator. Con_t64 converts C64 native files into T64 (turbo tape) format which is supported by every emulator. Con_PC64 converts C64 native files into PC64 format supported by PC64 emulator (file extension *.p00).

C64:

Basic 2 ASCII (BtoaC200) - tool for converting BASIC program into ASCII text which can be then transfer to PC and print-out or whatever. Note: this is C64-native code so you must transfer it on C64 before using. There is source code (assembler) in ASCII format.

ASCII text editor (C64WORD) - it is conceptually similar to the MS EDIT text editor from DOS which means it has some 'advanced' features like selecting text, copying or deleting selected text. It can recognize a different character sets (C64,USA,CRO), it can read files bigger then 64Kb, also it can convert ASCII text in C64 BASIC format. Archive includes C64 exe and sc. code.